The rainforest is hot. And humid. After half an hour’s hike, everything you’re wearing is soaked through, from the inside and out.

You drink a lot. It is easy to run out of water. But hey, no worries. In Sapo, they have the water liana. Cut off a piece, and water starts flowing out of the porous wood.

The water is fresh and cool, with a slight taste of sap. Like being kissed by a tree.

That I’m obsessed with photographing trees is no news – anything to do with trees, leaves, moss, bark, especially mossy bark. But what I’ve never really thought about is how fascinating mushrooms could be. I’ve been so caught up by the beauty of trees that I’ve completely forgotten to look for the wonders in other types of organisms. Sapo became a real eye-opener for me. The diversity of mushrooms in the jungle! The colours, the patterns, the shapes. I couldn’t stop. I became known among the rangers as the mushroom fanatic, and every time anyone saw a new species, they pointed it out to me. I was in amateur photographer’s heaven.

Our first day in Sapo started with us being invited to introduce ourselves to the village. First, the chief ranger welcomed us to the park and introduced us to the paramount chief and the men of the village. Meeting the paramount chief is a big deal in Liberia, he is the traditional leader and the most revered and respected individual in local communities. The paramount chiefs are even consulted when regional and national politicians need to make decisions, because it is essential to be on good terms with the paramount chief in order to get local communities on board to any changes. The paramount chief of Sapo and surrounding villages blessed us while the leader of the women’s village council drew two lines of ash on our foreheads, to protect us from any dangers in the forest.

Then, mom held a speech, introducing us and saying how grateful we were for the important job that the village was doing, both for Liberia and the world, in protecting the rainforest, and how important it is to teach our children to respect and protect the nature. All villagers solemnly nodded in agreement. And to round off, she presented the village youth leader with a gift: a football for the children, and she challenged the village youth to a game of football against us Europeans once we were back from our hike.

The village lies a couple of kilometres from the park, and to get to the actual boundary you have to walk on a wide and easy trail for about an hour until you reach the Sapo River. That makes up the western boundary of the park. To get into the park, there’s a canoe that you paddle across the river.

As always when I hike in groups, I soon lagged behind the others due to my constant urge to take photos of trees and mushrooms. Mom, Prince, Jimmy and two rangers waited for me, which led to the other ones already having crossed the river when we arrived there and we had to wait for the boys that had helped carry our tents and food to come back from base camp before we could cross ourselves and continue our hike inside the actual park. It was quite nice, actually, to get a chance put down my backpack and wander around a bit, and take turns paddling the canoe on the river. I love canoeing.

Once across the river, though, the hiking directly got a lot trickier. Here, the path was barely visible. It was like entering an impenetrable wall of green, with splashes of brown on the ground. And the air, like breathing the breath of a tree, moist, warm and earthy. Which, strictly speaking, we probably were – the photosynthesis and transpiration in this place must be insane.

The late group (except Jimmy, who took the photo) in front of a majestic Yupaca tree that we met right after getting off the canoe: the happy geographer, Prince, mom and the chief ranger Augustine.

About an hour of hiking from the river lies the park basecamp. It consist of a small clearing with a fire place and a small basic cabin. This is where we cooked and dried our sweaty clothes and eventually slept in the tents we had brought with us and put up in the four rooms inside the cabin. Sure, it is remote – but I was surprised at the comfort we found there in the middle of the supposedly almost inaccessible jungle.

My plane from Casablanca arrived in Monrovia at five in the morning, just before the sun. I was picked up at the airport by mom and an embassy driver, the dawn slowly creeping up on us while we drove into the city.

The view from mom’s third floor apartment: Dawn over Sinkor

I barely had time to repack my bag. The original plan was that I would have one night in Monrovia before we went anywhere, to get the transit exhaustion out of my system – but then three young men rolled two home-made bombs on luggage carts into the arrival hall at Brussels airport. So, now, one hour after arriving at mom’s nice, clean and cool apartment, we left again, met up with some acquaintances of mom’s in a second jeep (traveling in Liberia should always be done in twos, for safety). We headed east on the still hot and dry, but bumpy dirt road toward Sapo National Park.

I drifted in and out of sleep, while mom drove and our guide Jimmy and mom’s friend (and environmental science student) Prince discussed politics.

The trees became higher and higher, forest patches denser and denser, and by five, dark, ominous clouds suddenly appeared out of nowhere and large, heavy raindrops started falling. We had arrived in the tropical rainforest zone, where the sheer density of transpiring organisms drives its own, local climate system. Short showers of rain arrive in the late afternoon, every day, like clockwork.

Later than expected (as always when dealing with Liberian roads) we arrived in the Sapo village, on the edge of the national park. We set up our tents by the cars in the dark, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, awaiting our first rainforest dawn.